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cosmicray
Posts: 7286
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 Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2013 6:06 pm Post subject: twitter methods and etiquette |
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I have finally joined twitter 
Tweeting a particular product page is easy (in the the actual link is a highly compressed t.co built by the twitter platform).
Is there any way (other than the obvious full url) to tweet a link to my store's home page (like if I want to run a short term sale, or something like that) ? |
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AudioGasoline
Posts: 1015
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| Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2013 9:10 pm Post subject: |
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Welcome to the Twitterverse!
Well, there isn't a Tweet button on our home pages, so sharing the link manually is really the only way, as far as I know (same thing if you wanted to tweet a category page). If you're wanting to cut down on the length your links to save characters for actual words, there are many URL shortening services you can sign up for (Bit.ly, Ow.ly and lots more), all are free to use. Scheduling services like HootSuite, Buffer or Tweetdeck have built in shorteners as well (or you can also link them to your preferred shortening service for analytics and such). |
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viewfinders
Posts: 1561
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| Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2013 10:04 pm Post subject: |
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Twitter is a mystery to me. I have used it for years but only for business. If any of my friends and relatives are on Twitter they haven't let me know. I occasionally send a new listing to twitter or an old one that is pertinent to the season but all it does is increase the number of bots that have crawled the listing.
I don't know about anyone else but I never read anything anyone posts on my page. They are all other sellers other than a few other cat fanatics. But I don't read their posts either. I follow anyone who follows me who isn't flooding twitter with a post a minute and is not obscene or writing in a language I can't make out.
I haven't a clue if it is doing anything for me or not. |
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A-Better-Way
Posts: 3363
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| Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:22 pm Post subject: |
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It's not you  |
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AudioGasoline
Posts: 1015
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 2:20 am Post subject: |
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| viewfinders wrote: | | Twitter is a mystery to me. |
Yes, we've seen many sellers express the same sentiments here. I think you're right, it is a little mysterious because it's different from other networks. And it's VERY different from Facebook, which has been the standard of social media marketing for so long that it's engrained in us certain assumed "rules" of marketing. But Twitter just doesn't follow those rules very well. It's also mysterious because it's developed its own sort of language; reading through the posts from experienced tweeters is not unlike hieroglyphics. Coupled with the character limit that leads to pretty loose grammatical rules, and sometimes it looks like a bunch of nonsense until you can learn the language. The big mystery of Twitter for us is "How do I attract followers?", and I really think that solely tweeting product ads is not going to do it.
Consider all of the constraints at Facebook that dampen our marketing efforts: limited reach to our own followers, punishments for over-liking or over-following, business likes/mentions on other pages don't officially "count", restricted use of certain functions, etc. Much of this was done because regular users didn't like being assaulted by ads all the time when they're trying to connect with friends & family (at least, initially). Those same usage limitations don't exist on Twitter, but people are still trying to use it primarily to socialize & connect, and they still don't like being assaulted by ads all the time. I think this is the biggest reason that it doesn't work to just post product ads all the time. With businesses, people seem to want to follow accounts that give them things to talk about, laugh at, share, learn something from, comment on, etc. They want things they can interact with, which doesn't have to be sitting there talking to them. Things like videos, audio, images, blog links (yours or others'), news articles and such are our friends in this regard. The product ads get sprinkled in (that's what it's all about, after all), and users will tolerate more ads per day than they will on Facebook. A feed of only ads don't give them a big reason to follow, but if they like the other things you're posting they'll follow you and see your ads too. I've said it before: you gotta post a variety of tweets.
| viewfinders wrote: | | I occasionally send a new listing to twitter or an old one that is pertinent to the season but all it does is increase the number of bots that have crawled the listing. |
The idea of dropping lots of backlinks for the bots to crawl is another set of rules that Twitter doesn't always follow. If you run your ads through a scheduler that gives analytics, like BufferApp, you could see how many of those are real hits. Twitter is notorious for hampering SEO cross-talk with Google, and has even locked Google out before with "no-crawl" code (and they still barely tolerate each other). Twitter also doesn't index every tweet for their own search, nor do they keep tweets searchable forever - both of these things limit the amount of effective crawling the engine bots can do. Google has lost access to Twitter's firehose, and can't handle 200 million tweets a day without. Google doesn't index the "@" sign, so "@username" gets indexed as "username", losing SEO juice in the process. Also, Google treats mashed together usernames as a different word (that is, "AudioGasoline" is different to Google than "Audio Gasoline" with a space in it), losing more link juice. All of these things can weaken the effect of the traditional SEO strategy of just spreading backlinks for the web crawlers. There is some crawling that takes place, but the consensus seems to be that it is considerably much less than other social networks. Twitter really works best for direct marketing, straight to real people on the other end.
| viewfinders wrote: | | I don't know about anyone else but I never read anything anyone posts on my page. They are all other sellers other than a few other cat fanatics. But I don't read their posts either. I follow anyone who follows me who isn't flooding twitter with a post a minute and is not obscene or writing in a language I can't make out. |
The biggest problem with groups of sellers following each other, IMHO. It's like a flea market full of sellers all showing their wares to each other, but the front door is locked and no buyers get in. You should realize that most people's twitter feed is flooded with many posts a minute from the people they follow, and if you're not squawking enough you won't get noticed or heard. I recommend finding Twitter accounts that interest you, and especially those pertinent to your wares. If you can find something that holds your interest and sucks you in a little bit, you'll gain a better idea of how Twitter works, how other businesses like you are using it and what the followers of those accounts are attracted to. A lot of insight can be gained just by clicking around, following links, reading through feeds, watching what other businesses are doing with their tweets. There's a lot of articles out there about Twitter, and some of them are good, but it's kind of an over-reported topic and hard to weed through. Jump in and wander around Twitter a bit and it should demystify a bit. Then you can tackle acquiring followers, but learning the system should really be the first step. The best thing about Twitter in my opinion is that you can make what you want out of it. You could give it full time attention or none at all (hopefully somewhere in between), but you get out of it what you put in. The hard part is finding the right way to use it for your needs, but once you have an established footing the maintenance is much easier. (And more interesting, in my opinion, than boring-old-Facebook or flat personless Pinterest.)
*Sorry for the long post. Just couchin' it tonight and got long-winded. |
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thelivesandlovesofmaggiethecat
Posts: 10159
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 3:25 am Post subject: |
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Good post Audio Gas.
What has always turned me off about Twitter is the amount of time it would take to click on the links in other people's posts to see if it is of interest to me or not. The 144 spaces doesn't allow people to post enough lead in tags to capture my interest and I for sure don't have time to click on everything. I spend enough time on FB where I try to keep business ads to a minimum. If someone only posts business ads I hide their posts without unfriending them. I try to keep FB personal and for connecting with social and news sites that interest me.
I am becoming more and more concerned with how much time I spend on nothingness. A consequence of senioritis I suppose. |
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cosmicray
Posts: 7286
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 6:38 am Post subject: |
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After digging around in the twitter docs I have learned the following ...
Twitter shortens any normal links I post to a t.co link, which always consumes 20 characters.
Twitter highly recommends that you not use any other link shortening services. This may be an enforced requirement. Theory being that twitter can disable any t.co links found to point to malware or spam. |
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cosmicray
Posts: 7286
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 6:44 am Post subject: |
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Something else I noticed about twitter:
When I opened my account, immediately I had one follower. I did not recognize the person, but the name sounded vaguely familiar. After a full day, I had un-followed that person, but I still wondered who he was. Some searching with Google finally revealed that he is someone who posted a craigslist ad several years back, which I responded to. Ever since then he seems to use my email address for every social networking site that exists.
It appears that he had pre-followed email address, assuming that some day I might join twitter (and every other social networking site it seems). I have now blocked him, so I don't have to read whatever he decides to post, nor send my tweets to him.
I may change my view about this as time goes on, but for now I don't see any reason to be connected. |
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AudioGasoline
Posts: 1015
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 6:44 am Post subject: |
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| Maggie wrote: | | What has always turned me off about Twitter is the amount of time it would take to click on the links in other people's posts to see if it is of interest to me or not. The 144 spaces doesn't allow people to post enough lead in tags to capture my interest and I for sure don't have time to click on everything. I spend enough time on FB where I try to keep business ads to a minimum. If someone only posts business ads I hide their posts without unfriending them. I try to keep FB personal and for connecting with social and news sites that interest me. |
I still spend time on Facebook too, more out of ritual than success. It feels deader than MySpace these days, but there are still a few people that interact so that's enough I suppose. For a decent return on my time investment though, Twitter is hopping with activity.
You may not have heard, but there was a recent announcement from Facebook concerning "Hiding" people from your news feed: the "Hide" function is changing to "Unfollow". I haven't heard if it will be retro-active to people already hidden, but it could cause us to lose followers who were just being polite by hiding us (assuming that at least some people lose interest in us eventually). It will be interesting to see how the change might impact Follower numbers. |
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AudioGasoline
Posts: 1015
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 6:51 am Post subject: |
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| cosmicray wrote: | After digging around in the twitter docs I have learned the following ...
Twitter shortens any normal links I post to a t.co link, which always consumes 20 characters.
Twitter highly recommends that you not use any other link shortening services. This may be an enforced requirement. Theory being that twitter can disable any t.co links found to point to malware or spam. |
Absolutely not enforced in the slightest, that I've seen or heard of. I've never even heard this recommendation. They might just be shortening our already shortened links anyway; after all, they are really just re-directs. The link shortening is to preserve space within the 140 character limit for actual words. I guess I'm not understanding why this feature would give you pause? |
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AudioGasoline
Posts: 1015
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 7:05 am Post subject: |
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| cosmicray wrote: |
It appears that he had pre-followed email address, assuming that some day I might join twitter (and every other social networking site it seems). I have now blocked him, so I don't have to read whatever he decides to post, nor send my tweets to him. |
It seems like there's sour blood between you, but if you've blocked and unfollowed him, is there harm in knowing he still sees your tweets? Does he maybe just follow all of his business connections, hoping they will follow back? Maybe there is more to the story, but these seem like pretty slight reasons to discount a prime marketing avenue in its entirety. (I don't mean that rudely.) Do these cons really out-weigh the pros? |
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cosmicray
Posts: 7286
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| Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 2:47 pm Post subject: |
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| AudioGasoline wrote: | | cosmicray wrote: | After digging around in the twitter docs I have learned the following ...
Twitter shortens any normal links I post to a t.co link, which always consumes 20 characters.
Twitter highly recommends that you not use any other link shortening services. This may be an enforced requirement. Theory being that twitter can disable any t.co links found to point to malware or spam. |
Absolutely not enforced in the slightest, that I've seen or heard of. I've never even heard this recommendation. They might just be shortening our already shortened links anyway; after all, they are really just re-directs. The link shortening is to preserve space within the 140 character limit for actual words. I guess I'm not understanding why this feature would give you pause? |
Actually ... even if you use another link shorting service, twitter is still overlaying the short link you post with a t.co link. Scan down your link of tweets, and mouseover some of the links (e.g. bit.ly) and notice that the underlying link (displayed at the bottom of your browser window) is actually a t.co link. Twitter does a redirect to the other service, which then does a redirect to the next url in the chain. If any of the chain operators decide that it is malware, they can break the chain (for that short url). Not a bad deal IMHO. |
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dccollectibles
Posts: 2760
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| Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2013 9:01 am Post subject: |
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Speaking of etiquette, I believe it's considered good form (and good business practice) to RT a post of yours that is RT by someone else. How do you do that again? Just got a retweet of our 24 Hour Sale.  |
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AudioGasoline
Posts: 1015
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| Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2013 11:02 am Post subject: |
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| The "usual" etiquette is to RT a mention, but to RT an RT would just be RT'ing yourself. Make sense? Because a straight RT keeps your original message, name, pic, etc with a tiny little message about who RT'd it. It would look to others like you RT'd your own tweet, which is weird. If, however, they compose their own tweet and use your @username, that is a "mention" and businesses regularly RT those. Kind of like "look what others are saying about us". |
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dccollectibles
Posts: 2760
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| Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2013 12:17 pm Post subject: |
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Ah, yes that does make sense, but there seemed to be no way to straight RT from the email anyway. I ended up copying the whole post with a thank you mention and RT. Oh well, no one ever accused me of being normal.  Thanks for the rundown.  |
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